


under sleeping stars

by a_gay_poster



Category: Naruto
Genre: (Implied) Agender Gaara, Angst, Gender Dysphoria, M/M, Prompt Fill, Trans Rock Lee, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-19
Updated: 2020-07-19
Packaged: 2021-03-05 06:35:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25369975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_gay_poster/pseuds/a_gay_poster
Summary: Lee’s body is beautiful, too, but Gaara never says this. There are certain words Lee doesn’t like to hear, words that crawl up his spine like insect legs and sting him like scorpion tails. Words that leave him shuddering.Beautifulis one of them.Or: How to love someone who doesn't love himself, a clumsy instruction manual.
Relationships: Gaara/Rock Lee
Comments: 19
Kudos: 127





	under sleeping stars

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a smut prompt fill on Tumblr, though this ended up less smut and more feelsy. The prompts were: "things you said under the stars and in the grass," and "things you said when you thought i was asleep."
> 
> Thank you to [EgregiousDerp](https://archiveofourown.org/users/EgregiousDerp) for reading this through and helping me figure out the warnings!
> 
> See the end note for warnings.

Lee only dresses in the dark. 

He wears the same clothes every day so he doesn’t have to think about his reflection in the mirror. Trains his body to the point of punishment. Like it’s a tool. A weapon to be felt and not seen. Cuts his hair just like his teacher’s and doesn’t look in the mirror for another six weeks. Secure in the masculinity emulation provides him. 

At the onsen, he never goes into the baths proper. He spends so much time training on the roof that it becomes something of a running joke. “Bushy Brows got so wrapped up in his training that he forgot to bathe!” Naruto laughs. But Gaara knows the truth.

He suggested they shower together once. It was intended as a romantic gesture, something he read in a book. A nod to indulgence in a village without water restrictions. Before he learned that Lee’s bathroom light bulbs have been burnt out for at least eight months and haven’t been replaced. But he knew from the look on Lee’s face—before he even said a word—that the answer was ‘no’.

At night when they’re together, Lee leaves the lights down low. His eyes scrape over Gaara’s body beneath him, pleased to look his fill. As long as his own clothes stay on. But the moment Gaara turns the tables, goes to strip Lee of his suit, the lights go out entirely. Heavy curtains are drawn in the window, and Lee navigates his way back to the bed by feel. 

Gaara hates many things, but he hates this thing the most: the way Lee hates his body.

* * *

Lee used to worry that if he died in a foreign nation, he would be sent home under his mother’s name. Not his real one, the one he chose himself. _Rock_. Firm. Strong. Unyielding. 

He would engrave it into his very bones if he could, Gaara knows. 

The other name, he buried beside his parents’ civilian headstone. He showed Gaara their memorial notice, once. Well-creased, in a box behind a picture frame on his bookshelf. Blowing the dust off. Tears in his eyes. _Survived by their daughter._

He shed that name like a snakeskin, like a moth sheds a chrysalis, born back into the world wet-winged and shivering. Gaara remembers him strifing with the paperwork, tongue between teeth and brush clenched wrong-angled in his hand, in the interminable wait for the surgery. Not the few short months of his childhood where he weighed his chances of death against his chances of being a ninja. The one he had to wait for, year after year, until his body stopped growing. The simultaneous pride and disappointment at another half-centimeter of height at his yearly check-ups. 

Even now he keeps the compression shirts in the bottom of his drawer. Gaara has found them, putting away laundry or looking for a spare sock. He doesn’t know why Lee keeps them. Perhaps the same reason there’s a folding crutch in the back of his closet. Perhaps some latent fear that he’ll wake up one day and it will all have been a dream. His surgeries, a failure. His body weakened. His breasts grown back. 

Now his dog tags and registration read the right name. His body scroll is labeled in thick kana: _Rock Lee_. But still he fears. The many ways a shinobi’s body can die. The many ways it can be found. A burnt husk. A skeleton, picked clean. Would they know enough, to recognize him by? Or would his body bag be labeled _unidentified kunoichi_? 

Gaara endeavors to protect him, so he never has to find out. A sand shield big enough to cover them both. The ultimate defense.

* * *

It was dark the first time Lee kissed him. 

The corner of Konoha’s Training Field Six is shadowed even in the daytime, grass dappled with spare light through heavy tree cover. At night the grass shimmers wet with dew, spider-silk fine and shivery white. 

There was the smell of grass in Gaara’s nose, fresh dirt beneath his shoulders where Lee pinned him to the earth. The gourd had crumbled to so much useless sand below him, once a cushion for a heavy fall. Gaara held down like a fish strung on a line. Tackled. 

Their bodies were burning hot with exertion from a sparring match. There was a cut above Lee’s eyebrow, bleeding freely. He smelled like blood. Sweat. 

His hands were hard on Gaara’s shoulders, and he stared and stared. Gaara watched his body move with each breath, the way he sunk and fell with the ebb and flow of Gaara’s chest rising. 

He didn’t say anything. Just bore Gaara’s body to the grass and kissed him. His mouth hot and clumsy. All teeth. 

Gaara kissed him back because he couldn’t think of an alternative. Because Lee’s hair was glossy in the moonlight and because his mouth tasted like salt, like copper, like the soba noodles they had just shared. He tasted the way aching felt.

Lee’s mouth had moved to his neck, his shoulder, white-hot heat. His fingers quick up and under Gaara’s shirt, under the fine mesh of his mail armor. 

When Gaara’s fingers found the clasp of Lee’s suit, the little hidden placket of his zipper, Lee’s body went very still. He froze like a prey animal. 

“Someone might see us,” he said. Then he stood. Quickly, on light feet. Held his hand down to Gaara and pulled him up too. Brushed sand and dirt off his back like they were friends. 

Gaara had thought him embarrassed, then. Scared to be seen with a monster, a murderer. Gaara’s hands were washed white in the moonlight, but they might as well have been red with blood. 

He knows better now. Heard it in Lee’s own words, spit between a half-bloodied lip and teeth that shone white under the moon. Held fast to the dirt of an alleyway by Gaara’s sand around his ankles. The shape of his weights, but unable to be snapped off. Unable to be dropped from a height with a lung-clenching cloud of dust. Pressed by Gaara’s question, like teeth against his throat: _Why?_

It’s not Gaara that Lee thinks monstrous. It’s himself.

* * *

Gaara has never thought much of his body. His body was once a vessel, then a weapon, now a figurehead. His body only has as much meaning as people perceive in it. It is useful in the things it can do, nothing more. 

Perhaps he and Lee are more similar in that regard than he thinks. But where Lee fights his body every step of the way, Gaara forgets his. Fails to nourish it. Fails to rest. A different body would have been no different at all, to him, he thinks. He would ignore it just the same. Two arms. Two legs. Two eyes. A heart that hurts. 

But Lee calls him _beautiful_. Looks down at Gaara with wide-eyed awe, when he’s sweat-drenched and slack-jawed and sun-kissed by dim bulbs. Gazes at him with frank envy from down on his knees. His cheeks heat with lust and jealousy when he has to clamber off Gaara to fumble for the straps of the contraption Tenten made him. A harness, he calls it. As if any part of Lee could be harnessed, could be contained. 

It’s wet rubber and cold metal, but it’s also _Lee_. So Gaara pushes back on it, pulls Lee closer, strokes with hand and mouth and body until it’s hot like skin. Like blood.

Lee looks at Gaara the way freed prisoners look at the open sky. The way seasick sailors look at the solid earth. Like he not only wants him, but needs him, _has needed_ him. He moves in Gaara like a storm takes the sea. A force of nature. Like he wants to consume him, the way a brush fire takes a plain after drought. Fucks Gaara into white-out. 

Gaara would let Lee burn him down. He has roots beneath the earth the way cacti do, secret stores of water hidden and untouchable. He could let himself be swallowed up and grow anew. And then he would beg Lee to do it again.

* * *

Lee’s body is beautiful, too, but Gaara never says this. There are certain words Lee doesn’t like to hear, words that crawl up his spine like insect legs and sting him like scorpion tails. Words that leave him shuddering. _Beautiful_ is one of them. 

_Handsome_ is fine. _Attractive_ , too. _Tough_.

“Sexy?” Gaara asked him once, a skewer of grilled fish halfway to his mouth as they strolled Konoha’s streets late on a festival evening. 

Lee blushed so hard even the pink of the fireworks couldn’t cover it up. Blood all the way at the tips of his ears. So Gaara keeps that one close to his chest, uses it only sparingly. 

But _beautiful_ is the right word for it. 

There are synonyms, none of them in languages Lee knows. _Beloved_ is close. _Wonderful_. 

Lee is all dark skin intercut with pale scars. Divots and bulges, angry red marks and fading purple keloids. A topography of a body. 

But in the dark, in their bedroom, with the moon through the curtains the only light, Lee’s body is a starscape. 

Lee knows Gaara can see in the dark. Gaara doesn’t remind him. His beast eyes drink in the moonlight, flat eye-shine, and Lee glows silver, body speckled with stars. The crescent moon slivers under each pectoral. Constellations on his knuckles, his neck. His bad arm and leg nebulae of Gaara’s own creation. 

It used to hurt to look at him. The way people sometimes cry upon seeing a great work of art. The way murderers cry in remorse in the interrogator’s chair. Gaara thinks this feeling might be the same—awe and guilt—but their history is stronger. The blood between them is thicker than an oasis’ last drop of water. Thicker than the salt of ocean brine, of sweat or tears. 

“You’re _magnificent,_ ” Gaara whispers. 

And when Lee turns, blinking muzzy with sleep and mumbles, “What was that?” Gaara freezes. Caught. Hand frozen on the striated cap of Lee’s shoulder. 

“Nothing,” he murmurs. Presses kisses to a thick eyebrow, the stubble of a jawbone. Pulls the blankets up and tucks them in taut. “Go back to sleep.” 

Lee burns under the sun, gold light on his skin and rebounding off his teeth, but at night he _shines_. Moonlight tangles in his hair. Galaxies spiral in his eyes. He stares Gaara down for a beat before he complies, starshine on his lashes. 

The moon has always disquieted Gaara, but on nights with Lee the creature within him slumbers.

* * *

Gaara only has one scar, right where everyone can see it. 

Lee wears his emotions on his sleeve, but Gaara wears his greatest vulnerability on his face. 

He regrets it, sometimes. Regrets marking someone else’s pain onto his body indelibly, when he was too young to know the difference. Between external and internal control. Between the pain he feels and the pain he inflicts. And now that mark can never be erased. 

He writes new meaning into it, with the touch of Lee’s lips to his hairline, with the gentle brush of fingers on crepe paper skin. Love, not for himself, but to be shared. Love for others. Love for his village. Love for his life. 

Lee is not ashamed of his scars. He wears them proudly, arms bare. They are the one part of himself he does not despise. Brands of determination in the heat-burns on his knuckles. Marks of courage on his arms. The needle’s pinpricks on his thighs just another word in the Braille of his body.

Gaara can’t call Lee _beautiful_ , so he says it with his hands. With touches feather-down light on every scar that leave Lee shivering. With the hot-wet press of mouth to jaw, to ear, to thin-skinned pulse-warm throat. With the sounds he makes in Lee’s ear, and the sounds Lee makes in return.

He speaks the language of his body, and he hopes Lee understands.

**Author's Note:**

>  **Warnings:** Gender dysphoria, including post-social-and-surgical-transition dysphoria; self-loathing; paranoia; misgendering (prior to a character coming out); a throwaway one-line reference to self-neglect (not eating/sleeping); a brief reference to canonical self-harm. This story is from Gaara's POV and his thought process is at times blunt or insensitive. This is not a story about 'the' trans experience, just one possible trans experience.


End file.
